FRANCIS PICABIA

Fleurs de chair, fleurs d’âme

30 MAY – 19 JULY 2025

ZÜRICH

From 30 May to 15 July, we will present the exhibition ‘Francis Picabia, Fleurs de chair, fleurs d’âme – Nus, Transparences, Tableaux abstraits’ on the 2nd floor. Picabia’s three major creative phases between 1925 and 1951 will be on display in a representative cross-section of 50 works. A comprehensive catalogue will be published for the exhibition with contributions by Carole Boulbes, Harald Szeemann and Hans Rudolf Reust as well as a lengthy conversation with Olga Picabia, the artist’s widow, and Pierre Calté, the director of the Comité Picabia, by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Stefan Banz.

FRANCIS PICABIA

Double soleil (Double Sun)

1950

FRANCIS PICABIA

Habia II

ca. 1938 and 1945

FRANCIS PICABIA

La brune et la blonde

1941 – 1942

FRANCIS PICABIA

Composition

1950

FRANCIS PICABIA

Invitation

1945

INSTALLATION VIEWS

1 / 2

From Hauser & Wirth Publishers

Francis Picabia: Fleurs de chair, fleurs d’âme

Accompanying the exhibition curated by Stefan Banz, this publication features a text by Harald Szeemann and an interview with Picabia’s wife Olga Picabia conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stefan Banz. Although not widely supported institutionally at that time, Picabia was an important figure and mentor for many of the artists who would exhibit with Hauser & Wirth in later years, including Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades, Djordje Ozbolt and Andy Hope 1930.

About the Artist

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia was born François Martinez Picabia in Paris, to a Spanish father and a French mother. After initially painting in an Impressionist manner, elements of Fauvism and Neo-Impressionism as well as Cubism and other forms of abstraction began to appear in his painting in 1908, by 1912 he had evolved a personal amalgam of Cubism and Fauvism. In 1915—which marked the beginning of Picabia’s machinist or mechanomorphic period—he and Marcel Duchamp, among others, instigated and participated in Dada manifestations in New York. For the next few years, Picabia remained involved with the Dadists in Zurich and Paris, but finally denounced Dada in 1921 for no longer being ‘new.’ The following year, he returned to figurative art, but resumed painting in an abstract style by the end of World War II.

Learn more about this artist